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Appreciation Gift Ideas

Everyone needs to know they’re appreciated but especially moms! It shouldn’t just fall on one day a year and you don’t have to spend a lot of money to let her know what she means to you. Check out these homemade appreciation gift ideas she will love, and the kids will have fun creating them all on their own.

Mother’s Day is great isn’t it?? A day where you get gifts, maybe taken out to dinner, and lots of hugs of course…but one day in May just isn’t enough to show the women in our lives how much she means to us. Of course, I’m a bit biased myself since I am a mom. But I’m speaking for women everywhere when I say that we’d love a “just because we love you” gift out of the blue that is handmade with love with thought behind it. It doesn’t need to cost a lot, or anything at all really, so my girls thought aloud this weekend and came up with a few appreciation gift ideas that not only work for moms but teachers and dads too! They deserve more than one day too. 😉 Take a peek at what we came up with and let us know if you’ve done something for the woman in your life out of the blue that she loved and still remembers today. Special thanks goes out to Pampers at Sam’s Club for sponsoring this post so we could share out gift ideas with you.

Here’s where we started….we brainstormed. What do my kids love doing and is a way they can express their love for someone?

They paint, draw, and write. So, we started there. Handprint art, they thought!

We have paint, paper, and I bet we have a container we could put special things inside, so we could create something special….for grandma!

And we went from there.

Whenever we think of a project to do we start with what we already have at home, so this is what we gathered for these appreciation gift ideas:

Washable paints – I can’t stress the word washable enough 😉

Paper – or a wooden box, or a flower pot works well too

Paint brushes

Cups of water – to rinse between colors

Pampers wipes – and lots of them especially if you’re doing footprint art too (even though I don’t have babies anymore I still buy them in bulk, you can get up to $5 off of them here too)

My girls decided to make butterfly handprint art and a heart footprint art.

This is how it was done:

Paint their hand and press it down as you see here.

Paint their thumb a different color and make that the butterfly’s head.

For the footprint heart paint each foot red

Paint one at a time

Use a few Pampers wipes to clean that foot before painting the next (helps avoid some of the mess)

Position them as you see here so they resemble a heart

Once you’re done with the initial painting let them paint on other sheets of paper if they’d like and create simple appreciation gift ideas such as cards for their teachers or a friend at school.

Once everything is dry, let their imagination go to decorate the rest of their handprint art so it really shines and turns into something special, but leaving the handprint in tact because grandmas and moms love looking back at how little their kids hands once were.

If you use a box you can fill it with things that person might enjoy, this is what we included in ours:

A soft blanket

Brownie mix (they could help make with her + Pampers wipes to clean up the mess when they’re done baking)

Nail polish (so they could do her nails)

Fuzzy socks – always a winner

Hot cocoa

If you’re looking for a few fun and inexpensive appreciation gift ideas I hope we gave you a couple of ideas, we have many other handprint art ideas here if your child is interested in painting something other than a butterfly or heart.